6.5 Limitations of diff

The diff utility may have limits on the lengths of lines that
it can process, though the GNU diff program has no such limits.
This means that if you are using cssc in combination with a
diff which has a line length limit, that limit will apply to
the operation of the csscdelta and sccsdiff
programs (though not to any other component of cssc).

This kind of problem may cause delta to fail because the file
you are checking in contains an over-length line. However, because
sccs files may be operated on by sccs implementations that
have different upper limits, you might also find that the delta you
checked out from the history file already contained a line which is
longer than can be coped with by your delta utility. GNU
cssc can always be switched back a mode in which there is no line
length limit (i.e. the mode which is usually the default) and so can
be used to work around such situations.

Bear in mind that implementations of diff and sccs on a
given system can have different limits on the sizes of lines
that can be handled by delta, get and diff. This
is not the case with the GNU system however, which has no such limits.

The diff utility will also fail if the last line in one of the
files being compared does not end in a newline. To work around this
you can either encode the file as a binary file (see admin) or add
a terminating newline (which is usually the best course of action).

The diff program to be used by the cssc tools is selected
when the configure script is run, before cssc is compiled.
Configuration explains how you can determine which diff command
is used by cssc.